Monster Movies Full Movie
Karoline Oum
It was the life-changing moment that sent me on the path to being a cineaste or at least a fanboy. There was a party at my Aunt Phyllis' house. I think it was in San Jose, CA, or some other part of bland suburbia that would soon be known as Silicon Valley. My mom and dad were in the dining room with the other grown-ups getting bombed on screwdrivers made from Donald Duck Orange Juice that was probably meant for the kids' breakfasts. I remember a dog, sliding-glass doors, some kind of mood-lighting and actual shag carpeting.
It was getting dark outside, so the kids couldn't play in the backyard anymore. As we filed into the living room and gathered around a wooden, console TV-set that probably weighed a ton, one of my cousins asked if I'd ever watched "Creature Features."
My cousins manually turned their TV to KTVU Channel 2 of Oakland, and "Creature Features" began with an intro of cobbled-together film clips of werewolves, vampires, aliens and Vincent Price. All of this was set to a piece of dirty funk filled with wah-wah pedal bass as a demented vocalist screamed variations on the show's title while taking the time to introduce our host, Bob Wilkins. Wilkins, for his part, eschewed the Dracula drag that was de rigueur for horror hosts in other parts of the country. Instead, he looked like a kind of proto-hipster with his horn-rimmed glasses, side swept bangs and outsized cigar. Enthralling his audience by telling them to turn the channel, Wilkins lent an air of authority to a film library that desperately needed it.
On page 76 in the extensive chapter on Wilkins' 1971-79 run on "Creature Features," I find that "Yog: Monster from Space" aired on Saturday, September 20, 1976. I was six years old, and was maybe two weeks into the first grade, which explains the last throes of summer feel that the party at my aunt's house exuded. "Yog" didn't run on "Creature Features" again until January 21, 1978, a date by which I'd already racked up a troubling number of hours watching monster movies on local television. With the release of "Star Wars" in May 1977 only deepening my obsession with science fiction, there was no way that I was seeing "Creature Features" for the first time at that point.
Out of the theta-wave induced dream state that is childhood, my next clear memory of having seen "Creature Features" comes almost two months later on November 8, 1976 with a showing of "Lost in Space" producer Irwin Allen's junky remake of "The Lost World" (1960). Where I find the movie's reptilian cockfights between crocodiles and monitor lizards with fins glued to their backs to be pretty revolting now, I thought "The Lost World" totally delivered the goods at a time when I judged the quality of a film only by the number of monsters it had in it. By this standard, "Valley of Gwangi" (1969), a lesser Ray Harryhausen effort with dinosaurs attacking cowboys, was a far better film than "Casablanca" (1942) with its total lack of monsters.
May 12, 1978 was the night that my Grandma Nina and I bonded over a "Creature Features" showing of "The Creeping Terror" (1964), a zero-budget piece of frustration where a moldy piece of discarded carpet menaces South Lake Tahoe. While coming back from a commercial break, Wilkins flashed a hand-drawn title card on the screen that read, "This film is rated P.U." My grandmother nearly fell out of her chair laughing at that. By the end of the show, Wilkins had taken to threatening to quit broadcasting altogether and open a worm farm. Worm farms were kind of the Bitcoin of the '70s.
Despite my steady televised diet of seeing walking corpses drink the blood of the living or toss little girls into ponds, I don't remember being particularly scared by any of this with a couple of exceptions. First, there was any time that Wilkins showed just the trailer for "Night of the Living Dead," which sent me scurrying from the living room for the safer confines of the kitchen. And then there was "The Blob."
She said she'd only be gone for five minutes, but that five minutes stretched into 20, giving the blob plenty of time to devour hobos and small town doctors. Every little creak of the house or sound coming from outside had me jumping out of our ugly tweed couch. I became certain that the gelatinous mass from space had consumed my hamster. It only seemed like a matter of time before it oozed into the house from underneath the backdoor to get me.
And now I know that this whole partially TV-induced trauma took place on September 11, 1976. Just a year earlier, my mom and dad were together, partying at my dad's sister's house. Somehow, everything had fallen apart in that short time. Marriages were dissolved. Houses were sold. Schools were switched. Lives had turned upside down. While monster movies (and comic books, and monster movie magazines) offered me some escape from so many childhood cataclysms, I also now know that I was always drawn to this stuff even before I was at the center of a family court custody battle.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: "Shock It to Me" researcher Ron Huber passed away after a battle with cancer on February 3, 2014. In addition to compiling the TV listings for "Shock It to Me," Huber also maintained the UHF Nocturne website, an invaluable resource for late-night movie addicts from Northern California. Huber's work in chronicling local television had value, and he will be missed.
These films will never be surpassed by any fright flick Hollywood tries to churn out these days. Don't get me wrong, in terms of sheer terror-inducing power, these old films are definitely dated. But what they lack in present-day scares, they make up for in spades with a very satisfying spooky atmosphere.
If you haven't seen this movie, let me tell you, it's what made the Hollywood horror film craze really take off: The dark castle, the cob webs, the cloaked vampire with piercing eyes and the fluttering wings of a bat in the corridor.
Everything about this movie screams atmosphere. And surprisingly, a lack of music throughout the film creates a uniquely chilling mood that helps you get lost in the black and white glow coming from your screen.
These days, I find movies that truly create an all-consuming atmosphere to be fewer and far between. Hollywood has churned out some exceptional offerings, though, not just in horror but in all sorts of genres.
The weekend before Halloween this year, and last year, we got a taste of the movie atmosphere that film fans enjoyed back in the earliest days of Hollywood: The Binghamton Theatre Organ Society presented at the Forum a spectacular performance with live music of the famed silent film "The Hunchback of Notre Dame."
A large screen displayed this 1920s-film era classic, while live organ music reverberated throughout the theater, sending us into a sometimes-creepy, but mystifying world. Last Halloween, the feature was "Phantom of the Opera," one of my personal favorite silent films. Both starred Lon Chaney, Hollywood's famed "Man of a Thousand Faces" and the film industry's first truly gifted character actor/makeup wizard.
I encourage anyone to give those films a try. Watching them through the eyes of not the modern film-goer, but rather someone who enjoys Hollywood history, will show you just how today's offerings could use a serious course correction.
This is a list of monster movies, about such creatures as extraterrestrial aliens, giant animals, Kaiju (the Japanese counterpart of giant animals, but they can also be machines and plants), mutants, supernatural creatures, or creatures from folklore, such as Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. These movies usually fall into the science fiction, fantasy and/or horror genres.
Movie monsters come in many shapes, sizes and species, from parasitic slugs to reanimated dinosaurs to creeping mounds of space gelatin. Some are meant to symbolise social ills or reflect the deepest, darkest human fears, while others are clearly reflective of the issues their designers have been working on in therapy. In other cases, some monsters are just unholy beasts that are often nauseating to look at but impossible to turn away from, driven only by pure instinct.
Say hello to my little friend
Once a byword for inventive cinematic sleaze, the name of Frank Henenlotter has been all but forgotten by modern horror enthusiasts. Basket Case was his early '80s calling card, the tale of a browbeaten, morally ambiguous twentysomething and his homicidal, basket-bound vestigial twin as they undertake a mission of vengeance against the doctors who separated them against their will. To modern audiences, this darkly comic tale of monstrous brotherly love is most fascinating as a depiction of New York in its hideous heyday, a shattered urban hellscape populated almost exclusively by hookers, thieves, junkies and murderers, lit by flickering neon and the flash of ambulance sirens.
Sexually frustrated ape inadvertently invents base-jumping
Anyone who has never shed a tear as this love-struck great ape uncomprehendingly swats at his tormentors from the top of the Empire State Building is as stone-hearted as Skull Island itself. Special effects pioneer Willis O'Brien made Kong one of the few cinematic monsters to occupy the emotional as well as the narrative heart of their own movie and his towering achievement is still the benchmark for anyone who would make a myth from a ropey old monster yarn. The 1976 remake was a dull rehash that paired Love Boat-style soap with an inexplicably green monkey, and while Peter Jackson came close to capturing the wonder of the original, the 1933 vintage remains a dark fairytale unmatched by modern pretenders.
All of which would count for nought if not placed into the hands of such a master technician and gifted storyteller as Spielberg, and despite its arduous shoot (Spielberg broke down with nervous exhaustion mere hours after the film wrapped) the Magic Beard managed to fashion an effortless and streamlined example of pure cinema, and created one of its most durable and elemental horrors.
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